Fresh from completing its acquisition of the data-collaboration startup Samooha, data-cloud company Snowflake is doubling down on so-called clean room technology as it looks to make further inroads with the advertising, marketing, and media industries.
Samooha provides tools that let companies, or different divisions within companies, securely share data across computing and cloud environments while ensuring compliance with privacy laws.
A company that sells sneakers, for example, could partner with other apparel brands or a streetwear publisher to find areas of overlap between their customer bases and get insights about their spending habits, or which celebrities and influencers would make the most sense to front a marketing campaign.
The use of clean room technology within marketing departments has grown in recent years amid the increased rollout of global privacy legislation like California’s CCPA and Europe’s GDPR. The industry is also grappling with the loss of identifiers on iPhones and the upcoming phase-out of third-party tracking cookies on Google’s Chrome.
Cofounded in 2022 by serial entrepreneur Kamakshi Sivaramakrishnan, Samooha had raised $12.5 million in venture funding and quickly gained traction with its easy-to-use functionality that was built on Snowflake but worked across various clouds, such as Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure. Terms of the acquisition weren’t disclosed; in 2023, Snowflake Ventures took a 25% stake in the company at a $40 million valuation, AdExchanger reported. Prior to Samooha, Sivaramakrishnan sold her data startup Drawbridge to LinkedIn, and she was on the research science team at the adtech startup AdMob, which was sold to Google in 2009.
Samooha, which was previously offered as a native app on the platform, is now fully integrated into Snowflake Data Clean Rooms, the company said on Thursday.
Snowflake had already operated this clean room prior to the addition of Samooha, but it now intends to turbocharge the product, which it will offer for free to its customers. They can use the clean room with non-Snowflake customers who also won’t incur a cost, which the company hopes will drive new business.
“It allows for non-Snowflake customers to come and experience the value and use of Snowflake via the use case of collaboration and clean rooms,” Sivaramakrishnan said.
Snowflake is actively staffing up for its clean room product, adding to the roughly 20 staffers it acquired through Samooha, the company said. A search for “clean room” on Snowflake’s careers site brings up 10 open roles, but Bill Stratton, Snowflake’s global head for the media, entertainment, and advertising vertical, said it is also looking to hire in sales roles across various industries to encourage more collaboration between its customers.
Major broadcasters and publishers such as Time Warner, where Stratton was previously, have been early adopters of clean rooms.
Stratton said he sees further use cases among retailers, travel companies, and financial services — industries where companies are increasingly launching their own media businesses to take advantage of the traffic to their websites and apps, and the exclusive data they have on their customers.
“Our expectation in the next year is that people will be talking less about the tech and actually understand the value,” of Snowflake’s data clean room, Stratton said.
“We expect media companies and publishers to deliver hundreds of millions of dollars in advertising on top of the data clean room from us and marketers to have transparency from campaigns that they never had before because of our data clean room,” he added.
The company also wants to push the clean room beyond marketing applications, into areas such as healthcare and life sciences, where it’s crucial that data is shared securely.
The clean room space is competitive and marketers intend to spend more on the tech
Ultimately a data clean room is only as valuable as the customers who share data within it — even when it’s being offered for free. Snowflake is operating in a highly competitive space against the likes of Amazon and Google, which have their own clean room products, plus specialists like LiveRamp and InfoSum. (In many instances, Snowflake also partners with these companies.)
“Clean rooms are no longer competing against other clean rooms only,” said Wayne Blodwell, the CEO of the programmatic advertising company Impact Media. “They’re competing against all forms of measurement and targeting, so having a clean room within a suite of options makes sense from Snowflake.”
The global data clean room market has accelerated in the last two years. A 2023 survey of 500 executives conducted by Deloitte Digital found that one in three companies were using data clean rooms “extensively,” while 87% of respondents said they expected their use of data clean rooms to increase over the following year. The report found that these companies, on average, spent $879,000 on data clean room tech in 2022.
Snowflake has previously set out a goal to achieve $10 billion in annual revenue in 2029, up from around $2.6 billion in its last financial year, which ended January 31. In another indication of its increasing crossover with the ad industry, the company recently appointed Sridhar Ramaswamy, a former leader of Google’s advertising business, as its CEO.
